Tyson's ECOWAS Occasional Journal - Politics in West Africa

I updated my post on the Benin election , to add Prime Minister Zinsou to the top of the list, and then I noticed a friend of mine shared a post from Henri N'dah-Sekou  with all 52 candidates. One for every card in the deck! Here's the content from his post (I bolded the names that were in my earlier post): 2016 comme jamais!  Plus de 50 candidats pour la présidentielle. Une vraie brochette. Un pur casse tête pour la CENA.  Un vrai labyrinthe pour les électeurs. Les 15 millions de caution fixés par le code électoral seront ils suffisants pour dissuader certains?  1 Ake Natonde  2 Karimou Chabi Sika  3 Patrice Talon 4 Pascal Irénée Koupaki  5 Abdoulaye Bio Tchane 6 Celestine Zannou  ...

Tribal politics are often blamed for many of Africa's troubles, including the response to Ebola. The multitude of mother tongues posed problems for the response to Ebola since many of the communications about the disease and how to avoid it were in English or French and only 20% of the affected countries' populations speak either of those languages. Some traditional healers were reluctant to refer patients to hospitals.  However, local tribal leaders also played an important role in the effective response to the disease in Sierra Leone, where the last person known to have Ebola in Sierra Leone was discharged on  Tuesday . According to The Economist , Ebola in Sierra Leone struck Sierra Leone first in the east side of the country. But the disease was controlled in the south-east earlier than it was in the north-west (see map), despite the north-west receiving more aid. The explanation given in the article is that two doctors connected to the local chief called for a m...

As I mentioned in an earlier post , the electoral code adopted in April banned Burkina Faso's former ruling party, the CDP, and some of its allies from competing in the upcoming election. The banned parties appealed to the Constitutional Court, who turned them down in May because of inadequate signatures. The banned parties appealed to the ECOWAS Community Court, and in July that court ruled that banning those parties was a violation of their human rights. So the CDP registered to compete in the election, along with some aligned parties and parties made up of former CDP members. Now the Constitutional Court of Burkina Faso has ruled that the electoral code IS constitutional, and the banned parties are banned. Or at least some of their candidates are. The CDP held a press conference about it yesterday, and are calling for their supporters to launch a campaign of civil disobedience if they are not allowed to participate in the election. When they were in the opposition, ...

Her Spirit may be Rising, but she doesn't seem to be Running Following the three elections coming up this October, there will be two presidential elections in ECOWAS countries at the beginning of 2016: Niger, where first-term President Issoufou is eligible to run again in January, and Benin in February.  There's been some interesting drama regarding the Benin race so let's take a look.  President Yayi Boni is finishing up his second term, so it's an open race. There was speculation that President Yayi wanted to amend the constitution to enable a third term, but his party did poorly in the parliamentary election in May , so that option was shut out.  The most famous Beninois in the United States is surely Angelique Kidjo , and there was hope among some last year that she would run, but their Facebook page hasn't been updated in ten months so I don't think that's happening. Bummer.  The recent drama among actual candidates circles arou...

Ebola survivors tell their stories at the Survivors’ Conference in Kenema, Sierra Leone. WHO/S. Gborie Reuters: "Sierra Leone released its last confirmed Ebola patient from hospital on Monday and began a 42-day countdown to being declared free of the virus ..." But they aren't necessarily out of the woods yet: "During the course of the epidemic, the outbreak has ebbed only to flare back again. Liberia was declared Ebola-free in May but a fresh cluster of cases appeared nearly two months later. Scientists say sexual transmission is the most likely explanation for the resurgence in Liberia since the virus can live on in semen beyond the usual 21-day incubation period." Other recent good news on the Ebola front: an Ebola vaccine in Guinea shows promise .

Former minis ter  Gilbert Noël Ouédraogo selected as  presidential candidate by ADF-RDA Friday was the deadline to register for Burkina Faso's October presidential election, and Reuters notes that many among the 22 candidates are a former prime minister or minister. That's pretty standard in African elections. As I mentioned last week , the main candidates in Guinea's upcoming election (also in October) includes the incumbent president, two former prime ministers, and potentially a former president. When I wrote about the Burkina Faso election earlier in the month, I cited an article on leFaso.net that said that the deadline was August 1st and there were 98 candidates. I'm not sure if that article was wrong, I misunderstood, or the deadline was extended and some of the candidates didn't qualify. Anyway, the four top candidates mentioned by Reuters were the top four in my list of eleven :

Boko Haram really doesn't like Lieutenant General Tukur Buratai, who was appointed in July by President Buhari after he fired the military top brass for their failure against Boko Haram under Buhari's predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan. Last month, Boko Haram burned down Buratai's house (he wasn't home). Yesterday, they attacked his convoy . Ten of the attackers were killed and five captured; one Nigerian soldier was killed. Since losing control of most of the territory Boko Haram held at the start of the year (at that time it was the size of Belgium), the terrorist group has resorted to hit and run tactics. If Boko Haram hates Buratai that much, I figure he must be doing a pretty good job. It's a good sign that he is always on the ground, rather than hiding out in the capital, which is what Jonathan's military chiefs were apparently doing. This article says that in yesterday's attack, "soldiers led personally by Buratai returned fire, killing five...

Up to $12 billion of Nigerian oil money was "diverted" by the corrupt folks in its state-owned oil company, reports the Economist . "The state-owned oil company sells almost half the 2m barrels that Africa’s biggest producer churns out each day, making it the government’s single largest source of revenue. It has been dogged by allegations of wrongdoing since Mr Buhari helped create it back in the 1970s. Under the watch of the former president, Goodluck Jonathan, and his petroleum minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke, it ran totally out of control. Even as the price of oil boomed between 2011 and 2014, remittances to the treasury fell (see chart). Now that prices have plummeted, government coffers are empty and the currency has tanked." Thanks in part to his corruption (as well as his poor performance against Boko Haram), Jonathan lost to Buhari, and now Buhari seems to be delivering on his promise to root out corruption. " Mr Buhari has sacked the NNPC’s b...

Prof. Deborah Brautigam (Johns Hopkins SAIS) wrote on Tuesday on CNN.com about how China's recent shock currency devaluation will affect Africa. The devaluation, unlike what China was apparently doing in earlier decades, was not a move toward "undervaluing" the currency; China's currency before the recent devaluation was reportedly "overvalued" because of its link to the increasingly strong dollar, and t his devaluation brings it closer to market value for a basket of currencies.  But the result of the devaluation, regardless of its motivation, will be the same. China's imports into Africa will be cheaper, and China's buying power for African exports will be weaker.  Although cheaper imports from China will be nice for some African consumers (when I was a volunteer in Benin, most of the local bicycles were made in China, for example; many cell phones in Africa today are made in China), the currency devaluation poses a number of develop...

All of the upcoming presidential elections in ECOWAS countries, from this year through 2020, are listed HERE . I just found a nice source of information on elections in Africa, with an interactive map, from the Africa Research Institute . Three countries are having elections this coming October, in a veritable Presidential Election Extravaganza. In earlier posts I covered the upcoming elections in Burkina Faso and Cote d'Ivoire . Today I'll briefly go over Guinea. A little history: Ahmed Sekou Toure was president of Guinea from independence in 1958 until his death in 1984. In 1960 he declared the Parti démocratique de Guinée (PDG) the sole legal party in the country. He was re-elected in single-party elections in 1961, 1968, 1974, and 1982 . Upon his death in 1984, Sekou Toure was succeeded by his prime minister, Louis Lansana Beavogui , who acted as interim President briefly until he was deposed in a military coup led by Lansana Conté and Diarra Traoré . Conté ...

Malian security forces rescued hostages, including five foreigners, who were evacuated to Bamako. Photograph: Bernd von Jutrczenka/DPA/Corbis I've been ignoring the recent violence in Mali because I was hoping it would finish up and then I could write one post that covers the full story, but stuff seems to keep happening so I'll post a quick summary of recent events. Hotel Attack in central Mali On Friday August 7, "Suspected Islamist militants attacked a hotel in central Mali used by U.N. staff, killing at least six people, taking others hostage and holding off troops encircling the building ... Friday's violence began with a raid on a military site in the town of Sevare, around 600 km (400 miles) northeast of the capital Bamako, that was successfully repelled by government troops ..." On Saturday, August 8, " Five foreigners were evacuated and a number of hostages freed after they were trapped by gunmen in a hotel standoff with soldiers in centra...

The BBC and Reuters reports this morning that "Guinea Bissau's President Jose Mario Vaz has dismissed the government of the fragile West African nation because of a deepening power struggle with the prime minister." In the United States, it sounds funny to read a headline that the president dismissed the government, because in the US (presidential system), the president leads the government. But Guinea Bissau has a semi-presidential system, with a president head-of-state and a prime minister head-of-government, and the prime minister leads the cabinet. But the president can sack the prime minister in Guinea Bissau. I suppose now the president will nominate a new prime minister, and a majority of the parliament will need to agree, or else new elections will be held. The article doesn't mention elections so I don't think we're at that point yet. There is a whole blog about semipresidential systems, called "The semipresidential one," at http:/...

There was a nice piece in the Monkey Cage about what did the Ebola outbreak teach us about West Africa, with specifics from Liberia, by journalist and researcher Ashoka Mukpo. He starts by noting that the rule of thumb for journalism is, “If it bleeds, it leads.” This is why when so many Americans think about Africa , they think that all that is happening is civil wars and disease outbreaks, if they aren't just thinking about safari animals and primitive tribesmen. I remember when I was leaving for the Peace Corps in Benin, and people were telling me to watch out for Ebola. That was in 1995, when the Ebola outbreak was in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which you can see from this map is even further from Benin that the current outbreak. Benin is over 1500 miles from the DRC. Telling me to look out for Ebola in the DRC when I'm going to Benin would be like telling someone in Africa to look out for a snowstorm in Los Angeles when they tell you they're going to Chicago...

Reuters reports that "The party of Ivory Coast's ex-president Laurent Gbagbo (the Ivorian Popular Front - FPI) has chosen its leader, Pascal Affi N'Guessan, to run in an Oct. 25 presidential election that will mark its return to electoral politics following a string of boycotts since a brief 2011 war." President Ouattara is favored to win the election, with strong economic performance since his inauguration in 2011, and support from both his own Rally of the Republicans (RDR) party and his former party, and party of former presidents Houphouet-Boigny and Bedie, the Democratic Party of Cote d'Ivoire (PDCI). (Ouattara was a member of the PDC under Houphouet-Boigny; Bedie is still head of the PDCI.) Former president Gbagbo is awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court (Cour Penale Internationale, or CPI, in French) in the Hague for crimes against humanity. There was speculation that Gbagbo would be the FPI's candidate from jail, but that didn...

Yesterday, Cote d'Ivoire's government fixed Oct. 25 as the date for the upcoming presidential election. President Alassane Ouattara, candidate for the Rally of the Republicans (RDR) party, officially registered his candidacy with the election commission later in the day. Having the election scheduled for the correct month is a sign of major progress. The 2005 election didn't happen until 2010, thanks to the Civil War. Ouattara won the 2010 election against the incumbent Laurent Gbagbo in a run-off that was so close that the Constitutional Council declared Gbagbo the winner with 51% of the vote, despite the Independent Election Commission declaring Ouattara the winner with 54%. Gbagbo, with support from the army, was sworn in as president in the presidential palace and Ouattara was sworn in at the Golf Hotel in Abidjan, where he had a parallel government protected by UN soldiers.  The international community, including ECOWAS, stood with Ouattara , and after a se...

There are three presidential elections scheduled for this coming October in ECOWAS countries: Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoie, and Guinea. I'll take a look at each one, starting today with Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso Blaise Compaore  came to power in 1987 in a deadly coup against his former colleague, Thomas Sankara , who came to power in a 1983 coup ( yesterday was the 32nd anniversary of the Revolution) with the help of Compaore. Sankara, by the way, was a super charismatic guy, sometimes called "Africa's Che Guevara." Google his name and you'll find all kinds of cool graphics with quotes and such. Compaore wasn't as charismatic as Sankara but he's pretty wily. After Sankara died in an "accident" during the 1987 coup ( Sankara's death is finally being investigated now), Campaore shared power with two others in a triumvirate/junta, until the other two members of the triumvirate were tried and executed for allegedly plotting to overth...

The final version of my note on the April presidential election in Togo written with  Jules Ahlin  and  Kim Dionne   has been published by Electoral Studies. The article is freely available using this link  until September 16, 2015. A shorter version of the note was published in May in the Washington Post's Monkey Cage . 

Last night the Nigerian army reported that it had liberated 178 hostages from Boko Haram. Of these, 101 were children , 67 women, and the rest men. As far as I can tell, none of the liberated were among the 219 girls who where kidnapped in April 2014 that are Boko Haram's most well-known victims thanks to the Bring Back Our Girls campaign joined by celebrities and "regular people" around the world. However, after pretty lame efforts against Boko Haram through the end of 2014 that enabled Boko Haram to control territory in northeast Nigeria the size of Belgium , Nigeria launched a counter attack in January 2015 (as Goodluck Jonathan was approaching the presidential election) that has contained and reduced the territory controlled by Boko Haram and has liberated a number of captives.  In April 2015, Amnesty International estimated that some 2,000 women and girls had been abducted by Boko Haram since the start of 2014. The counterattack has managed to libe...